On the road again

I’m on the road again, just not with a twike. For the long distances I will use the train and for everything else I’ll keep riding my bicycle, but at least I’m on the road again. To catch up and to avoid getting another infection in my knee joint I’ll take the train as my kind of „bridge technology“.

As I leave Baden-Württemberg heading for Lusatia it is time to summarise what I learned about the energy transition so far:
Regarding the issue of climate change and the energy transition I often thought, what can one individual person really do? Of course there are tons of advice how to use less energy. The thought of only contributing a tiny drop in the ocean and especially the personal inertia, that we have to overcome to get started, and also the financial investment necessary to get started keep many people including myself from finally taking action.

However the rather successful development of renewable energy was mainly brought forwand by individual people. Ursula Sladek made clear in her speech at the “Save the energy transition” rally in Freiburg, that by now about 25% of the energy production in Germany come from renewable sources and half of it comes from power plants that citizens have built themselves or financed together als cooperatives.

Freiamt is a good example. The people in this town of 4300 inhabitants have built six wind turbines, 300 solar power systems on rooftops, and they are using biogas, hydro power, solar heat and geothermal energy from power plants that they build themselves mainly with their own money. Following a rotor blade for Freiamt’s new wind turbine has also been the most impressive experience of my journey so far.

The people decided for themselves and now they profit from producing energy themselves. That seems to be the key to success. There are very few wind energy critics in Freiamt, the mayority of citizens is proud of what they and their fellow citizens have acchieved. When investors showed up in the 1990s to rent locations for wind turbines, the people decided „We can do this ourselves“ and put their plans into practice.
Interviews with Hannelore Reibold-Mench (Mayor of Freiamt), Ernst Leimer (Association for the promotion of wind energy in Freiamt) and Inge Reinbold (Reinbold bio-energy)

„Never believe that a small group of committed people thinking new ways could not change the world. It has always been like that.“ Johannes Büttner told me this quote (more photos). In Freiburg-Ebnet he modified the house he rents to run on solar heat and wood-fired heating with lots of manual labour and mainly used materials. He changed the decorative garden into kitchen garden to produce food for his family and he drives and also repairs twikes.

Johannes Büttner

Freiburg has many showcase projects, that are internationally known and therefore get overrun by journalists and tourists from all over the world. So I was very happy that some scientists of the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energysystems took the time to tell me about their research on solar cells and electricity storage technologies.
Interviews with Alma Spribille and with Stephan Lux).Georg Löser and Andreas Hoffmann have shown me, how they made their homes independent from fossil fuels and the big energy companies. Reinhard Schwörer protested against the nuclear power plant in his hometown Wyhl when he was a teenager and has now been installing solar systems since the 1990s. I got to watch his employees install asolar system on a house in Rust.

We will get nowhere without the action of individual people. That’s also what Michael Sladek,said, when I interviewed him in Schönau concerning the project of BürgerEnergie Berlin that he supports with his knowledge. Committed people drive the energy transition forward in many ways. These committed people and their stories are what brings the enerty transition to life.
Governments can’t decide the energy transition top-down and large companies antagonise it. It’s the citizens who decide for themselves how they want to live in the future, and who say „We will do that“ despite the framework conditions getting worse.